While geospatial methods are an increasingly powerful research tool across many disciplines, there are significant barriers to curating and providing access to geospatial data. Discovery, metadata creation, web-based delivery, and preservation present significant challenges for libraries when dealing with geospatial content. Since 2014, a group of organizations has been collaborating to solve these problems together. This collaboration has seen the formation of several successes: open source software projects like GeoBlacklight, collaborative metadata sharing efforts like OpenGeoMetadata, and large-scale organization collaboration to provide federated discovery, such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal. While these endeavors have been successful, we have found that not all libraries have the capacity to host content in a digital repository or provide long-term access to data. This talk will discuss the state of the art in technology for geospatial content in libraries, current collaborative approaches that have been successful, and future work that aims to continue the mission of providing greater access to geospatial content.
https://geoblacklight.org/
https://geo.btaa.org/
https://earthworks.stanford.edu
